skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give me all of the top music software in the world and I won't be able to create anything worth listening to. Your statement is kind of like saying since word processing software and electronic distribution are widely available, books really aren't worth the price tag. It's the creativity and hard work that goes into books and music that makes it worth the price--not the cost of the distribution medium.
The problem with question banks, at least in normal academia, is making sure everyone gets a question set of equal difficulty. If one person gets asked for an algorithm to find the length of a linked list and another gets asked for an algorithm to remove a node from an AVL tree, that's not fair on the second person.

You could experimentally calibrate the question bank, seeing which questions trip students up the most, but that requires asking the same questions a bunch of times to different students, which is exactly what using the question bank was supposed to avoid! And if you want to reuse the calibrated data every year, you'll have to ask the same questions every year, which we prefer to avoid. I suppose with a sufficiently large student population an effective calibration might be possible - maybe Coursera will be the ones to do it!
Will using https prevent them from doing this? I imagine it would stop data gathering and referrer gathering but the source URL request they would still be able to see?

A VPN would be the only option to keeping them completely blind? I can set up a VPN on an Amazon micro instance for free. The amount of data used should be nothing or mere pennies per month to Amazon.

The only trouble is keeping a VPN up. I find on an iPhone at least that while once working, it works reliably, but keeping it working is unreliable. It seems when you transition from one network to another, one wifi to another, one cell tower to smother, or from wifi to cell and vice versa, the connection can often drop.

I wish there was a setting like "auto connect VPN when any data request is made".

I've tried VPN's from Amazon of my own creation as well as the VPN included with my GigaNews account.

I'm sure running the VPN on your mobile is great for battery life.
the baen free library has plenty of "first novel in series" books. the amazon sub-$2 daily sale does it a lot too. both have successfully got me to buy the next several books in the series.
The urge to move his <script> tags from under the <html> tags is killing me D:
Anatomy Of A Brokerage IT Meltdown
DownorNot is down
Apple Accessories Are Going To Be Plentiful And Affordable
I do have a point, but I think you'll be more inclined to consider it if you first make a guess yourself. So, what might my point be? Hint: Read some more of the entries at http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-peo... and ask the question, "In what way might these posts be more than just jokes?"
There's no empirical way to measure the amount of effort or creativity that goes into something. It just seems to me like 20 dollars for a movie is more justifiable than 15 on an album, based on the _apparent_ amount of work that went towards their creation (not to mention the actual cost). In the end, I could probably make an album myself, but I couldn't create an entire movie. Why are they priced so similarly?
> You would opt into macrology redefining == to be === or whatever you want.

Oh, please let the syntax for this be something like

let == = ===;

:-P
Wouldn't stripe's server logs also have the get params in cleartext?
US airlines rethinking on-board cell phone service
If 32-bit, low-memory machines are part of your world, I would say obviously yes.
He said "including Chrome." Chrome supports NaCl. This does not compute.
"But that isn't quite enough"..."HTTPS is easy to do and servers are plenty fast these days so there's really no excuse not to use it on all your pages, so that's exactly what we do!"

Does seem a bit ironic.
HiDPI is available in Aurora this week (the code that will become Firefox 18).
I wouldn't call it slightly different, GoCardless is not much good to people looking to lots of small payments.
A broker is an implementation detail; there's nothing stopping you from going peer-to-peer with $protocol and having publishers manage their own subscribers. Some sort of registry is still needed though; nslookupd in your case.

There is a bit of an impedance mismatch since now you have to go out-of-band to fetch information. Not saying it's a bad thing; that's essentially also the role of DNS and LDAP, among others, so it is a fairly common pattern.
While the point you make is certainly something to think about when travelling to developing countries, there are many developed countries out there as well where an app like this could be useful. The example given in the blogpost was Japan.
So... like Paypal?
I hope that this matches how some people think enough to help them.

For me it is too computational. I prefer understanding the topic from first principles as described at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4086325. (Then again I don't particularly like spreadsheets either.)
That's true, but at the same time there's more absolutely fantastic music in the world than I will ever be able to able to listen to in my lifespan. While you or I might not be able to produce it, there are probably thousands if not millions of artists out there who produce worthwhile music.

I'm not saying they're overpaid, but it is an interesting economic observation that the supply side of the market might be oversaturated relative to the demand.
The github GUI for Mac/Windows solves this problem completely, by hiding the vast majority of git's power-user features. (No stage, no no tracking branches, no manual rebasing.)
Responsive Web Design is bad for performance
I'm pretty sure they meant that the cookie would be a token and not contain the actual data.
Thanks for the reply. How was your experience with Keynote? I've never used it - is it user friendly or a hassle to get up and going?
It's definitely for a certain type of seller. Although you could technically use it for micro-payments, it's not very effective at all. There's Braintree among other competitors too.
Fixed that for you ;)

- First they said JS was not practical for building 'rich
internet apps' because of performance issues combined with
the well known maintainability problem with JS in large
code bases.
- Then they said it wasn't currently fast
- Then they said it hadn't been fixed
- Then it doesn't do multicore/GPU
- Right every time
- My advise: always bet on JS* being behind most other
languages because it is a slow moving standards based
language created in a dictatorial fashion by a committee
and input from a few powerful entities.
"The eigenvectors are the axes of the transformation" = mind blown. After several engineering courses, studying eigenvectors in an advanced math class and still no one could put it this simple. This guy is amazing.
Question. What happens if the Federal Circuit decides that it is unwilling to ever listen to the Supreme Court?

Does the Supreme Court have anything that it can do beyond being kept busy rehearing everything that the Federal Circuit bungled?
What happens when the people you love are no longer passionate about the product you're building because their interests have grown in a different direction? Now you're faced with the potential that someone sticks around only because they love the people but they're burned out by the work and don't want to face the possibility of doing what is necessary and moving on to another job where perhaps they don't (yet) love the people there but the job is what they're passionate about. There's also the issue of scalability. It's great that you love everybody in your 10 person startup, but how do you scale this out to build a business with 1000 employees? Short of slipping something in the Kool-aid, I don't think it's possible.

Another way to approach it is to work with people who are really competent and who you have an enormous amount of respect for. If, through work, you happen to form a bond of friendship with them that's great and you can continue to be friends even if your life takes a different direction. Should that happen, you can move on to a new job and still look for competence from people you can respect and build up that sense of camaraderie with a new team. Maybe it will lead to friendship and love. Maybe you'll not socialize with everyone on the team but you'll still have massive amounts of respect for their ability to get the job done that you don't need to feel like you have to love everyone. This approach does scale out to thousands of employees. If I'm in the same company as you, I don't have to like you but I should be able to expect that you'll perform your job competently which will earn my respect.
http://isitup.org/downornot.com

downornot.com is up.

It took 115 ms for a 302 response with an ip of 208.94.146.70.
We can already use quite a bit of ES5, and it's not so old. I'm sure the same will be true of ES6.

Also, you can compile from ES6 to ES5 or ES3 I would expect, plus there's also server-side tech like node.js.
> The macro syntax is definitely not simple, and it could possibly get really complex for more elaborate syntactic definitions, thus rendering the source much less readable.

True, but the same can be said of any API. Reading the definitions can help but for both complex macros and complex APIs built today out of just functions and objects you need to document your abstractions. Macros don't change this, they just give you another abstraction axis (syntactic) to work with.

As with most things it just depends on how you use it. Sure you can abuse macros to make tons of crazy, undocumented, hard to understand syntactic extensions that destroy readability. But you can already do that today. Used wisely macros can increase readability, used poorly they can decrease it.

> And does the effort to integrate macros into the browser mean that it'll be possible to evaluate macros "runtime"?

Not sure what you mean here. By definition macros are expanded at compile time (well, parse time really). The browser doesn't change this.
Would love some feedback on how to make the API less hackish.
I'm Canadian so obviously our privacy laws will be different but when I worked at a Telecomm we were told that in order to be compliant with the law we could only use customer data for what they has explicitly agreed to. Any changes to what we want we need to have them approve it again.
Eh, Kinda.
Verizon Communications owns the majority (55%) of Verizon Wireless.
Nice find! I watches the video and I believe you are correct.
I am already looking forward to the upcoming VPN witch hunt. When US provider are really going through with the six strikes "warning" system [1], VPNs will become more and more mainstream. It is going to be interesting which kind of CP/Terrorism yadayada they are going to pull this time.

As a VPN user for closed to ten years nw (yes, I am that paranoid/live in a tough-on-downloads region) I can honestly say, that its benefits outweigh the negatives by far. But it takes some time to find a stable VPN service, that fits to your expectations.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/six-strikes-inter...
How is that different from UUID version 3 and 5, which both use hash values?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
Good luck, just remember this is the early chapter of your book, and there is a lot of work still to do for a happy ending. It would be great to read this/similar post in 5 or ten years at the reunion, etc...
They're most likely being scrubbed out, same as you would with passwords.
This is cool. I tried to use my iPad to sketch some uml a while ago when I couldn't find a pen. Every app I found was pretty terrible.
Maybe opting out is not how to stop this abhorrent practice of selling personal information. There is much more at stake than sites just selling email address lists. There is much more detailed information involved.

Perhaps what would work better is flooding these marketers with false information. This is what hampers email lists. Most the addresses do not work.

As it stands the few (or many) people who fail to "opt-out" (or fail to use proxies) may make this sort of personal information sales market worthwhile because the information gathered is detailed and reasonably accurate. It's not just a list of disposable email addresses. It's higher quality.
Hah. This reads like a geeky Airplane!/Flying High quote or something.
That's very similar to the editing mechanism in Stack Exchange sites; a low-rep user (or even an anonymous user) can suggest an edit which then must be approved by two high-rep users or by the original poster. Or any high-rep user can just edit it directly, although that would be a less attractive feature on a site like Hacker News.
A notepad blows Github's issue tracker away. It's by far the least impressive part of the product.
I was interested both by your post as by your site. It's nice that you have browser extensions besides the mobile app(s).

I have a few questions regarding your Privacy Policy:

- You say you use web beacons; how and where are those deployed exactly?

- You write "Clipboard will not rent or sell your personally identifiable information to others.", yet later you say "As we develop our business, we may buy or sell assets or business offerings. Customer, email, and visitor information is generally one of the transferred business assets in these types of transactions."

What information exactly about the Customer can sold? And, can you guarantee that the personally identifiable informations are protected in case you sell the whole company?

- Why do I need to periodically check your Policy, instead of you emailing them to me, preferably in advance?

Other questions:

- Can I somehow export my clips?

- How do you make money so that I can trust you'll be here next month?

Thank you!
Writing copy is like drawing a comic strip
> He is out there.

Wow. You are so right. The idea that he would build this elaborate apparatus in furtherance of such a flaky goal staggers the mind.

The first impression is that the electronics does what he intended, but I failed to read why he was doing it.

No wonder he thinks he needs a vintage Accutron watch as a gateway into the beyond.

Maybe if he learned physics ...
Oh! Well that's a smart idea... that's kind of like showing you your private "profile picture" when you are logged in.

But if you have a session cookie, then you hardly need a password. Unless we are talking about a public computer where you need to enter your password.

I am talking about the times when you DON'T have a session cookie, and you are prompted to sign in with a password. That's the thing that could be spoofed.
Boom! The button idea is brilliant. It really seems like Stripe has the potential here to become the payment fabric of the web in a way PayPal once could have been but botched due to a lousy UX.
Sure, it responds to a request, but is it really what you expected when you go to downornot.com?
Great. But I would like the ability to customize the look of the button if it doesn't go with my design.
I think eventually the answer is to move away from centralized and for-profit providers and network architecture, both for the hardware side of the network and the software side.

http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
Add a "log in as user" button to the Django admin.
One of the big drawcards of buying a book on Amazon et al is that it's delivered automatically. I suppose these few clicks make it a hindrance for the lazy and having an automated process might make a few more sales.
Is the pun really worth the story?
Might be something to do with people usually not linking to tweets unless they're really notable. And app.net items are effectively just long tweets.
I'm representing Twilio (my employer) at the Compute Midwest Hackathon and the stated policy is that you own your own stuff.

That said, I personally will not get involved in any hackathon doing an IP grab. In fact, I'm fighting against one called 3 Day Startup (3DS). You can read about that here:
http://whatis3daystartup.com/whats-the-goal/

TLDR: 3 Day Startup is basically a Startup Weekend focused on students but anyone that participates signs over everything developed to 3 Day Startup.. later, the participants can license it back if 3DS approves.
One thing: pricing.

* Free private repo for small teams

* Unlimited private repos for pay customers (price is per user)

Github's pricing with a limit in the repo number makes it pretty much impossible to use if you're in the service business and you start a new project quite often. It may be fine for the startup with one main project, I guess.
I'm confused, if this is a search engine, where are all the ads?
Sometimes minimal is best. Then again, Google does have the 'I'm feeling lucky' button - maybe that ought to just display a few results for them?

Either way, nice experiment!
China's Huawei and ZTE Pose National Security Tthreat
To me it is unclear whether it is allowed to talk about solution after the hard dead line.
Is that ok?
Not publicizing them just talking about them in a closed study group.
Brendan, I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I think the only reason for my criticism (and the word "disrespectful" was too harsh -- I should have left it at "annoying") was that your last slide ("Always bet on JS") implies (to me, anyway) that JavaScript's high performance is its manifest destiny. And that, to me, understates the contribution of V8: the high performance of JavaScript was not a foregone conclusion; it required guts, innovation and hard work. As for the assertion that a trace-based JIT beat V8 to market, a trace-based JIT also has well-known failings, so it's not a terribly meaningful data point -- other than that it speaks to the aspirations perhaps for a higher performing JavaScript. But we clearly agree that Lars and team developed a terrific VM in V8, and that V8 was important in the history of JavaScript -- which was my only point.
Master-slave etc are HA techniques for replicating state eg queues (or "channels" as nsq calls them?). "Decentralized and distributed" has nothing to do with state, master/slave or any of that; it's a topological property of your system. You can certainly build a decentralized and distributed system using a set of brokers, regardless of whether they support HA.
Not sure how they get a 302, I get a 500. And in any case, a 302 is a redirect, they should follow it to know if it's really down.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/downornot.org gives a better result, in my opinion.
Do you guys think this movement can be applied to a team of people that are not developers? My team is mostly managers, scientists and marketing experts. They outsource most of the technicalities such as coding.

So I wonder how you can get excited about an idea, when you can only go so deep in understanding how it actually works.
It's ultimately the end quality and impact of the product that make it worth (or not worth) the price.

An album is more feasible to make on one's own, but it's also much more likely to be listened to many more times. I've heard my favorite albums far more than I've watched my favorite movies. But at the same time I realize how much it costs to produce a major motion picture, so I'm okay with paying ten bucks to sit in a theater for two hours. They provide me different kinds of value.

That quality/impact has always been what gave creative works value—the scarcity of physical distribution only enforced that value, it didn't create it. A physical copy of an album nobody liked couldn't be sold for $15, even though it was no more sharable than a physical copy of an album everybody liked. The problem facing creative works with the internet is finding a way to make money off of producing high quality works when you can no longer rely on physical scarcity. But that doesn't mean there is no value there anymore: genius and talent are still scarce.

Moving to models built on services like Pandora and Spotify could turn out to be a good thing if it shifts rewards in favor of things with lasting quality, not just a "make two good hits and ten crappy songs to push a bunch of one-time album sales." But I think they're going to have to bring in a lot more revenue to be really effective at rewarding truly talented artists. But hey, radio is able to do it, and that's a "free" service too.
> First you say the religious aspect of communities is coincidental then you say that religion forms chasm-surrounded communities. Which is it?

The dichotomy you think you see doesn't exist. They're both true.

Let me spell it out for you:

* The fact that many human communities are religious is a coincidence, an accident of history.

* Those religions that do form, tend to isolate themselves from other communities, sometimes by trying to convert or kill everyone they meet. This doesn't prevent them from being a community, any more than a community of rattlesnakes is not a legitimate community solely on the ground that it's dangerous to surrounding communities.

Clear now?
The solution for the count change is already in the recommended literature (SICP). And this was mentioned in the forums.
Personally (probably dreaming here), I'd just like to have a standard http header like "Screen-Width: 958", that I could then parse on a per request basis to decide what to send in my http body content. This would make RWD a whole lot easier...
That's exactly what the down-vote is meant for. If you think a comment is off-topic, down vote the post and perhaps add a comment as to why you think it deserves to be down-voted.

Flagging is expensive, in that it requires mod (human) attention. It should be reserved for spam and other egregious posts. Let the mods spend their valuable time on more important tasks.
EveryMove launches rewards program for your health
Ostrich Pillow: sleep at your desk literally like an ostrich
Someone likely used up their free quota:

OverQuotaError: The API call datastore_v3.RunQuery() required
more quota than is available.

I'm guessing that running a query on initial load is likely for capturing metrics. This should get refactored to fail silently and potentially also use a memcache-backed counter:

https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/scaling/mem...

Basically, store the count in memcache and only commit to the datastore when the counter hits a certain amount. You run the risk of losing some of your analytics but it's more important to keep your resource usage low and your app online than it is to capture every single hit.
Changes could at least be grandfathered in.

I'm actually more worried about what the current day patent battles portend for the future than what impact they are having now. We now have Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a horde of patent trolls aggressively patenting every possible concept they can, whether they are using it or not. And they are perfecting the art of getting patents through the patent office which are as general as possible in nature. If this continues in 20 years you will essentially need a license to practice software development from one or more of the big companies because every form of computation will be patented at the fundamental level. Large companies will be able to terminate any small startup by simply drafting a letter with a list of basic patents they are violating.
You might want to sanitize the placeholder attribute on the results page - in its current state, it is susceptible to XSS.